Topticketshop.com ripoff fraud dishonest scam sports concert ticket Internet

Topticketshop.com is an internet site that looks legitimate...it's very professional-looking. There are lots of tickets on offer, they list a dozen or so cities in which they have "offices" (e.g. London, Barcelona, Paris, New York, etc), as well as contact details.

Wanting to go to the French Open (tennis), I visited their website, where they showed that they had seats available in the section I was looking for (very front section...best seats).

Using my credit card, I paid a lot of $$$ for these tickets. The company policy is to deliver the tickets to your local address (in our case, a hotel in Paris) within 3-10 business days before the event. The tickets arrived at my hotel the day before, but then I noticed that the seats were in the furthest section, not the closest section.

The price of these tickets should have been less than 50% of the price I paid for them. I tried to contact the company using one of the many phone numbers listed on their website, but no one was answering phones. I ended up going to the event and paying an additional 80 euros per ticket to a street scalper to trade my tickets for better seats.

Since then (11 days), I've tried several times to contact them by e-mail to ask for a refund, but my e-mails remain unanswered. Apparently, the phone numbers are there for show, because I've also tried to call about 50 times and only gotten through twice...same lady both times...must be a very small shop. She basically told me that their "terms and conditions" allow them to downgrade the ticket if they are not available (despite the fact that when I first purchased them, they showed that they were available) and offer a refund for the price difference.

She said I needed to send them the information in an e-mail (again), despite the fact that they have all my order information on hand and know exactly what tickets they sent me. With a legitimate company, the refund would have been made automatically and immediately. When I explained that I had already sent several e-mails over the last week and gotten no reply, she said that she couldn't help me, there was no one else I could speak with, and then she hung up on me.

Given that I have yet to receive a written response and that the lady with whom I spoke appears to be the only person answering the phones (when she, in fact, does answer them), I'm not expecting any refund.

I wish there was some recourse for me. This was such a ripoff, and if nothing else, I want to spread the word to watch out for these scam artists.

Dan
Long Beach, California
U.S.A.